IWSG: Roller-coaster ride...but in a bad way

 

    So...August has not been a pretty month for me.

    (I mean, it never is, but worse than usual.)

    On the real-life side, a huge thunderstorm hit in the middle of the month, and a massive branch ripped the phone/internet line right out of the back of my house.  I was without electricity for about eight hours (as was like half the county, because it was a power station thing), and without phone or internet for a week.  This would be bad at any time, because it's surprising just how much I've come to depend on my WiFi (esp. since I have a very low data cap on my cell phone), but for it to happen while I was leading a team on a game jam...ugh.  So much extra stress that I did not need.  :(

    As to the game jam, that's where things get weird.  So, I was--of course--writing the game, a visual novel loosely based on about the first 2/3 of the Iliad.  (Well, on parts of the first 2/3 of it.  Like, you know, leaving out most all of the battles because it's being narrated by Patroclos...)  A visual novel, for anyone who might stumble across this post and doesn't know about them, is like the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books from the '80s, only it's a video game, and there are pictures of the characters and locations.  (And there are typically a lot fewer choices to make.)  From a writing perspective, it's a lot like writing a screenplay with a very verbose narrator.  ;)  (Remember the Jim Henson TV show The Storyteller?  Writing a visual novel is a lot like writing a script for that would be, except no way would a visual novel ever be able to get John Hurt to voice its narrator. :P )

    I finished the script back in July--this game jam ran from July 1st to August 31st, and it's much like NaNoWriMo, in that you're supposed to start from scratch at the beginning and finish by the end, only in a game jam you're also supposed to turn it in when you're done, so everyone else can play it--and it was almost a full 50k.  (I may have unconsciously slipped into NaNo mentality there, and been subconsciously aiming for 50k, though I don't really know how much shorter I could have made it and still told the whole story.)  This meant I had fulfilled my primary role in the jam, yes?

    But since it was my story and I had become the de facto lead of the team, I couldn't just bug out and do whatever I wanted in the interim.  I had to be constantly in contact with everyone else (especially hard without reliable internet access!), and I had to deal with every little problem that came up, especially every little problem to do with all the incoming art, especially the background art.  (There are a lot of locations in the game, so a lot of backgrounds were needed, and although there are resources online to get free (or at least extremely affordable) pre-made backgrounds, almost none of them fit our needs, given that our game is set in the 1980s in a Detroit-like city, and most of the art assets for visual novels are modern and typically look like a Japanese suburb, and/or high school.)  There were a lot of problems, as you might expect, but eventually the art did all pull together, even if some of it is barely more than a placeholder.

    But then there's the coding side of things.  I've written a few games before, using a very simple engine called TWINE, which is designed to be pretty much nothing but text.  Here's an example from one of my previous games:

    As you can see, some images are possible, but it's not as big a part of the experience as this:

    (Yup, that's the game I've been working on for the past two months.  From left to right, that's Achilles (Ace Lee), Patroclos (Pat Rock) and A.J. the Axeman (the Greater Aias/Ajax)...so you can see I took more liberties than just turning them into '80s rock performers...)

    Anyhow, my point is just that coding with TWINE and coding with Ren'py--the engine for this visual novel--is very different, and the script I wrote would have been downright simple to code in TWINE.  (It's way simpler than Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?, the game that first screenshot is from, which I wrote for a much shorter game jam.)  It is not so simple to code in Ren'py, especially since some of the nitty-gritty stuff (like positioning the character sprites) can't really be done until all the art is in.

    Consequently, we were only able to submit a demo instead of the full game.  :(

    And the stress of this whole thing has murdered my diet.  I feel like I've put on twenty pounds.  (Dunno if I actually have, but it feels that way.)

    Not that any of that is even really the point here, or what I'm talking about in the title of the post.  This experience has been murder on my self-perception as a writer.  As I mentioned last time, at no time was I ever truly satisfied with the script of this game.  That has only intensified as the month has progressed.  In fact, I was so unhappy with it that I decided to break the seal on an old NaNo novel in an attempt to cheer myself up by the comparison.

    I should probably explain that.  See, my second NaNoWriMo novel did not go as I wanted it to.  In fact, by the time November 30th rolled around, I was so disgusted with it that I closed the file and never opened it again...until this past month.  (Not quite a full nine years later.)  My idea was to reread it and reassure myself that my writing has at least improved.

    Only...um...it hasn't.

    Now, don't get me wrong.  That old NaNo novel was terrible.  Half the cast--or more--was directly stolen from various JRPGs, and very blatantly so.  (Admittedly, half of them were ripped off from a more obscure JRPG, so most people would be able to read it and think they were actually original, though they certainly scream their original characters' identities at me.  The ones so very obviously based on Final Fantasy VII characters, on the other hand...)  What little of the heroine that was unique to her and not just lifted from Yuffie Kisaragi was very much, well, what's known in fan fiction circles as a "Mary Sue."  Not as bad as most--at least a large chunk of the cast genuinely didn't like her--but she was very much "the special" and...ugh.  It was just so bad.

    But way more happened in it than usually does in my novels.  Every chapter had new events, new places, new people, things happening.  Most of my stuff is slow as molasses.  Whatever it was that I tapped into for that novel that let me actually have things happen...I've lost it, possibly forever.  :(

    Finding that out--that my writing is actually getting worse with time--was supremely depressing.  Like, I've been on-and-off mentally composing this post for about a week now, and some of it was very much "I'm the worst writer in the history of ever" kind of melodrama.

    But getting to play through the first few scenes of the game I wrote, with the sprites and the music and the backgrounds all coming together...that was pretty thrilling.  And it did make me feel a lot better about myself, and about what I'd written for the game.  (Though I still hate that my stupid script is why we couldn't finish on time...)

    Which isn't to say that I'm feeling great about myself or my writing, but...I guess it's left me in a slightly better headspace.

    At least for now.